An Up-Close Look at Hong Kong’s Famous Public Housing Complexes

There are 7.4 million people in Hong Kong, and nearly half of them live in subsidized housing. The origins of these essential buildings trace back to a shantytown fire on Christmas Day 1953, which left 53,000 people displaced. The government decided it needed to move quickly and, four days later, announced a plan to put all those residents in provisional two-story bungalows. The following year, the government accelerated the process by launching the Hong Kong Housing Authority and putting a plan in motion to build large, multistory H-shaped apartment blocks. These buildings would not only address the housing shortage caused by incidents like the fire, but also create much-needed space for low-income residents, elderly people, and people from rural areas who were moving into the city to work.

At the time, a shortage of government architects meant that early projects were instead doled out to private architectural practices, where each firm would be given a set lot and list of provisions and requirements, but would otherwise be allowed to pull from their own design aesthetic and personal ethic about what subsidized housing should or could be. That meant that each public housing estate could develop its own external personality, even if the interiors of the buildings—with their stacks of bare-bones, small-scale apartments—were fairly similar. Some architects used the wiggle room to add mild resident perks, like outdoor benches, small playgrounds, basketball courts for recreation, or concrete chess tables. (Since so many of the apartments have very little space for doing more than just sleeping or eating, the outdoor space is essential.) Some of the complexes also include space for schools, stores, or even the occasional entertainment venue or amphitheater.

Since Hong Kong’s public housing projects were developed between the mid-1950s and ’80s, the estates have housed millions of people in one of the world’s densest and least affordable places. The modernist-style high-rises have also become popular backdrops for social media posts, with buildings like the rainbow-hued Choi Hung Estate popping up all over Instagram. A new book, Concrete Hong Kong, from independent publisher Zupagrafika, aims to capture both the beauty and grime of some of these relatively stark structures, offering detailed looks at their architectural features through exterior photos and cardboard models readers can build themselves, allowing faraway audiences a sense of the housing blocks’ staggering size and scale.

Take, for instance, the aforementioned Choi Hung Estate. Built by Palmer and Turner (one of Hong Kong’s oldest architecture firms) between 1962 and 1964, the 11-block estate is among the oldest surviving housing projects in Hong Kong. When first constructed, the buildings housed over 43,000 people and their tiered design and communal outdoor spaces were so impressive that they drew dignitaries like Princess Margaret and even Richard Nixon, who played a game of badminton with some of the residents in 1964. These days, even though the buildings have gone viral, they only house about 18,000 tenants, and it was recently reported that the estate will likely be redeveloped, meaning all remaining residents will have to be relocated.

Perhaps some of them will end up in Ying Ming Court, a complex of five cruciform towers built in the ’70s and ’80s. Set in Tseung Kwan O New Town, on land reclaimed from the ocean, the towers are inspired, Zupagrafika says, by Le Corbusier’s infamous (and failed) 1925 Plan Voisin, which aimed to redevelop central Paris through the construction of 18 cruciform tower blocks, each 60 stories tall and, in total, designed to hold about three million residents. Ying Ming Court holds just 5,000 residents in 1,750 flats spread across five buildings, but at least some have fallen for (or accepted life in) the building, with its unpainted, precast concrete panel construction. Some residents have opted to buy their apartments under the Housing Authority’s Home Ownership Scheme, which lets residents purchase the places they’ve been living for years at prices under market value. They’re not big apartments—most come in at or below 554 square feet—but still more spacious than the city’s microflats or sweltering hot "coffin homes."

Throughout the years, different architectural firms have found unique and interesting ways to make their structures stand apart from the crowd. Palmer and Turner’s Cho Yiu Chien, for instance, was the first public housing estate to have a pool when it opened in 1981. Set amid a hilly landscape in the Kwai Tsing District, it was also notable for its "streets in the sky"–style design, which scattered eight residential buildings across different levels and connected them with not only bridges and walkways, but also with geometric shapes and octagonal balconies on the exterior, notable for its alternating yellow-and-orange paint scheme.

The Tsui Lam Estate, which sits in the northern part of Junk Bay and holds 15,000 residents in its over 4,900 units, sets the individual apartment blocks into Y-shaped tridents. That means the units generally don’t face each other, giving residents an increased sense of privacy, as well as more access to light, air, and city views. That’s also important at the Kwun Tong’s Shun On Estate, where—even though they’re arranged in a cruciform design—the buildings have angled facades, meaning residents on all levels should get at least some natural light. At Po Lai Court, in the Cheung She Wan neighborhood in New Kowloon, Vietnamese refugees, immigrants from mainland China, and longtime Hong Kongers live in buildings raised up on supports, setting them above street level and allowing spaces for a food market and library below. The building also has loggias on every story, giving the exterior a brutalist look—and the residents someplace to dry their laundry.

For years now, Zupagrafika has sought to document and heap a little praise on bulky postwar buildings around the world, and for good reason: Though these structures might seem massive and monumental, they’re not eternal. Depending on a nation or developer’s taste, some surviving examples (like the Choi Hung Estates) are still at risk of being demolished and redeveloped. Concrete Hong Kong is a tribute to the region’s 20th-century public housing estates, with their massive scale and modernist details. It’s also a tribute to the ideas the hulking affordable housing blocks suggest, because inherent in their construction is a sort of ethos about how we live amongst other people, especially in densely populated urban areas.

Top image of Hong Kong’s Ying Ming Court by David Navarro and Martyna Sobecka, published in Concrete Hong Kong (Zupagrafika)

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